Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Michigan

Change Region

comments

Ken Braun: Digging up Jimmy Hoffa's legacy as Teamster boss more important than digging in fields

Jimmy Hoffa dig 2006.JPG

This is just one of many digs for the body of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa: The Federal Bureau of Investigation evidence recovery team members and Michigan State University anthropologists and archaeologists search outside a horse farm in Milford Township, Mich., on May 18, 2006.
(File Photo | The Associated Press)

In an old Simpson’s episode, Homer deems himself to be the next Thomas Edison and conjures up numerous noxious inventions.
One is a smoke alarm that shrieks every few seconds to remind everybody
that “nothing is wrong.”

The FBI performs a similar function every few summers when it arrives in Michigan to conduct fruitless digs for the remains of Jimmy Hoffa. This week’s big revelation: After nearly four decades, the former Teamster Boss is still missing and presumed dead.

If
this keeps up, Michigan’s gullible summer campers will no longer be
sent out at night on “snipe hunts.” Instead,
we’ll start giving them shovels, send them off into the woods looking
for Hoffa, and then laugh while drinking beers by the fire.

A lot of our Hoffa fascination shows that credulity isn’t limited to children.

The labor leader’s namesake son has headed the Teamsters for 15 years - two years longer than his infamous father.
Of course, dad’s run might have gone longer if he hadn’t gone to prison for jury tampering, bribery and fraud.

There’s
a nice whitewash at work in seeing the younger Hoffa in the media these
days. Though we see no evidence of
what was once pervasive corruption in his union, its hard to envision
James P. Hoffa holding the job today if he had been anyone else’s child.
Jimmy R. Hoffa owed his rise to power, fall from it, and probably his
murder to a quite closely wired-up relationship
to America’s most powerful gangsters.

It’s
as if a child of Kwame Kilpatrick were to use his father’s reputation
to fuel a successful run at dad’s old
job as Detroit mayor. The media would be correct in never letting
Detroit voters forget such a legacy.

But with Hoffa, it’s like hearing
Homer Simpson’s alarm go off: Everything is still normal! Apparently, we
expect the Teamster rank and file to so revere
their corrupt and often violent legacy that they will naturally create a
Hoffa Dynasty.

Democrat
Bobby Kennedy relentlessly pursued organized crime’s influence over
organized labor throughout much of his
professional life. Hoffa and the Teamsters were prime targets, and Hoffa
hated the Kennedys.

One of Hoffa’s attorneys, Frank Ragano, was also
the lawyer for Tampa crime boss Santo Trafficante. Ragano alleged that
in early 1963 Hoffa begged Trafficante to kill
JFK. Whatever the truth of that, Bobby Kennedy’s Teamster crusade didn’t
survive much beyond his brother’s assassination, and no equally
prominent Democrat has been so willing to hunt the Sicilian mafia since.

Democrats still revere the memory of Bobby Kennedy, but if they’d had
him longer they’d likely have a much more problematic relationship with
the Teamsters and a few other unions. The result of more years of Bobby
Kennedy would have been harsher memories regarding the reputation of Jimmy Hoffa. The lack of a second Kennedy presidency - both JFK and RFK - made the rise of a second Hoffa Teamster Boss more likely.

The amnesia isn’t limited to Democrats. Some Republicans fondly recall
Teamster support for Republicans Nixon and Reagan. Rumors abound that Nixon’s crooked flunkies arranged their boss’ pardon of Hoffa in exchange for an endorsement and a ton of cash.

And one of Carter’s most conservative moments was the deregulation of interstate trucking - effectively a declaration of war on the Teamsters that drove them to Reagan’s side. With friends like that, Republicans hardly need enemies.

There will always be a fascination when the FBI goes digging for Jimmy. It would be more fascinating, and at least more honest to the history, to just as regularly dig up his legacy.

Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan
House for six years and is currently the director of policy for a
political consulting firm. His employer is not responsible for what he says here ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.